Why I Love My MacBook Pro.

I attended a photo editing workshop in Johannesburg recently and there were all these PCs around. I peeped at the screens and in my head heart, a voice said, These are crap. Why don’t these people get Macs?

Okay.. some history first.. I was a devoted PC user. I’m not one of those gals who only uses her laptop to check email and do online shopping. My PC was my life and I knew my laptop inside out.. right down to operating it in DOS platform, manually removing trojans and cleaning up and repairing registries.

After being a PC user for exactly 30 years, I decided to give Apple a try. I can’t really explain why. Perhaps I got caught in a weak moment where I felt I needed change. Perhaps my cousin was too convincing when he visited us and could not stop raving about how great his Macbook Pro was. He even offered to hold my hand through the transition and send me his entire collection of software applications.

So one day, I switched.

And life was hell for at least 2 weeks.

I couldn’t understand the Mac. I didn’t get him. I couldn’t figure out how he operated. The workflow confused me. I couldn’t get used to my window buttons on the left side of the screen instead of the right. I couldn’t get used to using my thumb to press a “Command” button instead of my pinky finger on the “Control” button. I missed the REAL delete button.

But now.. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my Macbook Pro. And I can honestly say I will never turn back to PC again.

Here are the reasons why –

First reason on the top of the list – It’s cool. FREAKING cool. Trust me. It’s so cool that if you are a frequent traveller, you’ll feel it immediately when you are clearing security and have to remove your laptop from your bag. It’s so much more shiok to pull out a slim solid looking Macbook Pro, instead of that plasticky HP or Dell you used to have. Even if it was a pink limited edition design.

2nd reason – Still cool. And this time, YOUR KIDS will think it’s cool that Mommy or Daddy is a Mac person. Trust me on this. Go in the Mac direction and your relationship with your kids will improve immediately by a million percent. I guarantee it. They’ll think you are cool and they’ll talk Mac with you. If you can talk Mac, you’re immediately in their world. Because that’s what the next generation is going to be about – iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs, Macs, MACs.

3rd reason – Still STILL cool. Seriously. It’s way cooler to tell people, I’m a Mac, than I’m a PC. =p

Okay.. now for the serious reasons – Speed. It takes me 1.5 mins to boot into my Macbook Pro from scratch. When it’s asleep or hibernating, it takes 2 seconds to wake it up. It takes average 30 seconds to install a software, and 1 second to uninstall it. Do we even need to compare PC timings with the Macbook Pro?

My monitor screen. I won’t talk technical specs. But if you have a blog with lots of photos like I do, the first thing you’ll notice when you walk into an Apple showroom and surf into your blog is – EVERYTHING looks better. The colours look more vibrant and alive. The lines look sharper.

The 4 finger swipe. The 3 finger swipe. The 2 finger swipe. Hell, basically the best trackpad ever in the world. I’m not kidding. It’s the smoothest trackpad I’ve ever felt and is fully customisable to pretty much do anything you want. Use one finger to move the cursor. Two fingers allows you to scroll up and down, left and right. Three fingers swipes you to the top of the page or to the bottom of your page. Four finger swipe.. the most precious feature of them all.. shows you in a flash every application and document you have opened at the moment. You’ll never miss the mouse.

Those are my kiddy Apple stickers. I like, okay!

Everyone knows you can run a Windows platform simultaneously next to a Mac platform in the same machine. I won’t go into the details, because I never installed Windows. In 2 weeks, I decided that I didn’t miss Windows at all. The only Windows stuff I run on my Macbook Pro is Microsoft Office for Mac. And that’s only so that I can open all my past documents that were created with Microsoft Office.

International support. This is lovely. Regardless of whether I am in Singapore, New Zealand or South Africa, when my Macbook Pro so much as chokes, I can send it in to any Apple centre to be serviced and repaired. And best of all, you are served by cute guys at what they call the Genius Bar. How cool is that?

No more Norton or McAfee. How often have our PCs been slowed down because of firewalls and virus protection softwares? You will never have that problem with a Mac because we don’t need anti-virus softwares for Mac. Well, at least not that I know of. And not YET.

Don’t forget one of the most attractive features of the Macbook Pro – The Power Cable. Tell me which PC laptop gives you a cable where the cord winds around the brick part of the adapter for neat storage. And the most brilliant part is the MagSafe power connector. The cable cord connects to the Mac by a magnetic contact. You can trip over your Mac cable a million times and as hard as you like, it will just slide right off the Mac and the Mac wouldn’t budge at all. No risk of the Mac landing on the floor!

I’ll be lying if I said the Macbook Pro is the perfect machine. Because it isn’t. There is no perfect machine. It has its flaws and some workflow are dumb and need getting used to. It also hangs occasionally, like every machine does.

But I love it because it’s a brilliant machine and it’s COOL. Seriously, if I’m going to have a gadget in my life that will take up like up to 30% of my time and one where I will bring with me wherever I go, it wouldn’t hurt if he looked good. Don’t kid yourself and say only specs matter.

So.. save up for that Macbook Pro. It’s worth it. And your kids will love you for it. =)